Title: Cleaning the Gold
Author: Karin Slaughter, Lee Child
Published by: HarperCollins
Publication date:  16 May 2019
Genre: Crime, Thriller
Pages:  82
Format: Paperback
Source: Bury Library

Buy the Book – Amazon

Blurb/Synopsis

Will Trent is undercover at Fort Knox. His assignment: to investigate a twenty-two-year-old murder. His suspect’s name: Jack Reacher.

Jack Reacher is in Fort Knox on his own mission: to bring down a dangerous criminal ring operating at the heart of America’s military. Except now Will Trent is on the scene.

But there’s a bigger conspiracy at play – one that neither the special agent nor the ex-military cop could have anticipated. And the only option is for Jack Reacher and Will Trent to team up and play nicely. If they can…

Review

Cleaning the Gold is a crossover book featuring Jack Reacher and Will Trent, two iconic characters from the individual authors series. The book is a short thriller story involving Trent going undercover into Fort Knox to solve a twenty-two year old cold-case with Reacher being the main suspect. Reacher is at Fort Knox for his own reasons; a case with a different flavour, bringing down a dangerous criminal ring.

I picked this book up from Bury Librarys section of short stories. I have a fair bit on my reading plate, but I wanted something quick and easy to get back into the swing of reading in the New Year. I admit, I am not familiar with Karin Slaughter or her character Will Trent, but I have been fortunate enough to come across Jack Reacher before. My father is an avid reader of Lee Childs Reacher books and I’ve picked up one or two after he’s finished with them, but it has been a while so it was nice to get reacquainted!

Karin Slaughter and Lee Child have come together in this short story and it’s nothing short of brilliant – it didn’t take me long to read and I don’t attribute this to the amount of pages. The two characters are well established at this point so there’s not wasting time with lengthy back-stories, just a quick paragraph or two about who they are and where they’ve ‘come from’ which is nice because the last thing a story like this needs is a load of bloat. The authors work almost seamlessly together, Lee Childs short staccato sentances work well with Karin Slaughters flow. The only bugbear I had was that Slaughter tends to use more cultural references in her words and while I find a small number of these useful for grounding, I found that they were a little thick and fast in Cleaning the Gold.

The plot is fast paced and progresses nicely to it’s satisfying conclusion. Having said that, this is only a short story and it doesn’t last long. I would very much like to read more of Lee Child and Karin Slaughter (Together or not) and see if I enjoy the rest of their series and these characters as much as I did during Cleaning the Gold. Moreso, I would love to see Lee Child and Karin Slaughter bring these two iconic characters back together in a lengthier book and see how they get on with something a bit more substantial.